A New York State financial regulator is investigating a security vulnerability at First American Financial Corporation, a title insurance company, that exposed an estimated 885 million records related to mortgage deals, the New York Times reported. The inquiry, by the Department of Financial Services, is likely to be followed by other investigations from regulators and law-enforcement authorities into a security failure that exposed 16 years of digital documents containing bank account statements, tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts and images from drivers licenses. In terms of the sheer number of exposed records, the leak appears to be the largest since an attack on Yahoo that compromised three billion user accounts. First American left the documents on a website that was publicly accessible, without any authentication protections, according to a report published on Friday by KrebsOnSecurity, a security news site.
